"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
06-30-2019, 07:28 PM (This post was last modified: 06-30-2019, 07:28 PM by Carnage.)
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
She crosses his mind, now and then.
He enjoys the link he has to her, the connection forged on their last meeting. One thought, and he can take away her vision, another, he can restore it. Sometimes he looks through her gaze, takes in the kingdoms or the children.
He has been gone, for a time – he doesn’t know how long. He never does, anymore, time has long since ceased to have any real meaning to him. Sometimes things seem to stretch on forever, other times a decade passes in a blink, he returns to find young lovers or children suddenly streaked with gray. This was disorienting, at first, but he has since embraced it, figuring such things come with omnipotence.
But he’s back to the mortal plane, for now, a physical being manifesting in the sprawling place that’s the meadow. It was here he last saw her (well, not here – the meadow was the jumping-off point, but his lair exists on no map, and he keeps it that way, something exclusive).
He doesn’t know why he always chooses the meadow – it is a lovely place, bright and open, which is exactly why he doesn’t fit. Every aspect of his physical appearance is normal, almost plain – a stormy gray, bearing the physicality of desert breeds and racehorses – yet at the same time his presence disrupts, as if the magic he wields is its own awful, physical thing.
No, he doesn’t fit, but he chooses the meadow because it has been here as long as he has. As long as they have.
An old place for old friends.
At least, to start with.
He blinds her before he pulls her forward, navigating her carefully enough – what’s a scratch or two? – liking to add a bit of mystery.
(Not that it’s exactly the most complicated mystery to solve, she’s been here before, and who else might blind and compel her?)
He does not hurry her journey. Time does not matter to either of them.
He waits, patient, for Ryatah to arrive.
@[Ryatah] im asking forgiveness rather than permission to post to you SO
Even if she had wanted to forget about him, even if she had been trying, it would have been impossible.
Every time her vision blurred and cut out, every time she felt like someone – something – was infiltrating her mind, it was a reminder. She was linked to him, perhaps only in this small way, but it was enough. It was enough to make her heart lurch in apprehension when she was suddenly left in the dark, it was enough to make her grow cautious should she find her lips reaching for another and they suddenly grew blurry in front of her.
But, it wasn’t enough to stop her.
Holding power over her vision was just that – power. She thinks – assumes, which is already a dangerous game to play when he is concerned – it doesn’t go any deeper than that, and it’s why she often ignores it. She had never been very good at resisting temptation when it was laid so plainly before her; not for love, and not out of fear. And maybe (most likely) there was a twisted part of her that craved that fear, that spike in adrenaline that came every time he blinded her, and maybe there was a small part of her that waited, that almost hoped he was coming back.
Today, as she stood quietly in the golden light of a mostly regrown Tephra, she is only mildly surprised when she blinks, and then reopens her eyes to an endless dark. She waits, for one heartbeat, and then two, with her breath caught in her throat, before she feels it. A pull, hardly subtle enough to be ignored, and she is forced to follow. Across the volcanic terrain of Tephra, and winding through forests where branches pull at her pale mane and scrape her porcelain skin, until there is the familiar smell of the meadow – vibrant and green, even though she can’t see it, and she had almost forgotten what it was like to have to smell and feel the sunshine rather blink the brightness of it away – and then, him.
“Carnage,” she says in that soft, unsuspecting way of hers, as if she is entirely oblivious to what is about to happen. It’s not an attempt to fool him into thinking she is calm; of course he will know the way her skin is flushing hot and cold, and the way her heart sometimes flutters anxiously. But she blinks her almost-black eyes, still lost in shadow, and she says with subtle, barely-there smile, “Nice to see you again. Sort of.”
Ryatah
even angels have their wicked schemes
@[Carnage]
you already know my answer to everything is always yes.
He’s pleased, watching as she stumbles into view, pleased to have her before him once more. They’re linked, and though it’s a connection he could sever whenever he so chose, he has not yet chosen it, has not gotten bored of her.
She says his name, and though her voice is quiet he can practically taste her pulse in his mouth. He likes it, that she finds pleasure in this, that she is ready and pliant under his power, that he can drown and revive her and still have her willing.
A breath, and he restores her vision so that she might behold him, so that he may meet her eyes and know he’s seen.
“Ryatah,” he says, and his own fetid smile curls on his lips, glad to have this moment, to be reunited in the meadow.
He steps closer, to touch her in greeting, yes, but to reclaim her, at least for now – he wipes from her skin the scent of all others, so that he is not reminded of the others (he is not jealous – gods have no jealousy for mortals – but such things can be distracting). His lips touch her withers, where he’d once drawn blood, then his brand, bright on her skin.
“How are the girls?” he asks, tone conversational, as if they’d happened upon one another. He hasn’t seen the children that came of their last coupling, save for a few glances through her eyes. This doesn’t bother him, his offspring have disappointed him, time and time again, and he has never been known as much of a father.
(He’d liked their names, though, found it both bold and amusing of her.)
He draws back, though he’s already hungry to touch her more, to reacquaint himself with her.
“I’ve thought of you,” he says, which is almost a tender statement, coming from him. Almost romantic.
Even though it has happened countless times before, the restoration of her vision causes her to suck in a breath. It’s always a surprise when it happens, but there is something more when it is him she is blinking away the blindness to see. He was becoming familiar; more so than he had already been, and she recognizes that sickness manifesting inside herself. That strange attachment, the one that she always tries to steel herself against, and often fails horribly. He is not the first to stir it to life, and likely won’t be the last, but she would be lying to herself if she said he wasn’t the most exhilarating.
She doesn’t flinch away when he reaches for her, because even though she fears him, it’s not in the way that she should. It makes her heart jump into her throat, because she never knows what the touch is going to be like; it was becoming too easy to fall into a false sense of security, thinking that that first touch wasn’t going to hurt, but she never knew when the rules were going to change. Her skin quivers wherever his touch lands, her pulse rushing and heat flaring to the surface, but her voice is light, unwavering when she answers him. “They’re fine,” her sable eyes watch him, knowing he doesn’t truly care, but entertaining him with an answer anyway. “They’re beautiful, but I might be biased.”
He withdraws, and she hates herself for the disappointment that flashes through her, fleeting, but there nonetheless. She resists the urge to follow, she fights back the twisted way she craves anything from him, knowing that she would get more than she bargained for soon. Instead, she lets herself get lost in their slow game, lets him play this part where he is almost sweet, almost romantic, almost not the dark god that ripped her eyes from their sockets years ago, and she is the fool that almost falls for it. “I think of you, too,” it was hard not to, when he sporadically blinded her, when his brand was so stark on her hip. “Probably more than you think of me, but I’m flattered to even be a passing thought that you sometimes come back to.” It is said with an almost coquettish smile – almost as if she could be teasing – but the sincerity that laces the words is impossible to hide.
He isn’t one for romance, but he enjoys games – scenarios unraveling, testing. It’s why his lair was built, after all, so that such experiments might unfold at a leisurely pace, over days or weeks or years, collecting data on any number of terrible and wonderful things.
She has done remarkably well on such tests, had flourished in his lair, even when she was damp with magicked water and the smell of death still upon her.
(It had been so beautiful, in a way, mostly because she had still wanted, after, a quality that is so rare in the women he maims or kills.)
He could take her back, he thinks. There are multitudes of scenarios they could unravel together.
But he is bored, of the lair. Other worlds call, the aching galaxies above.
“Good,” he murmurs, glad enough to hear it, though the children do not cross his mind the way she has. His children are a legion of disappoint, and he learned long ago not to invest much in them.
(This does not keep him from spawning multitudes, as if someday the odds will fall in his favor, and there will be a son or daughter worthy of his blood.)
It’s not evening, but it’s close. The stars will be out soon. He glances upward.
“Ryatah,” her name is rough in his mouth, coarseness to her coquettishness, “I’d have you come with me.”
It’s an invitation dressed as a command, or perhaps vice versa – he’d leave her be, if she refused, though perhaps wounded or otherwise punished. But he has always known her to be curious, if not exactly obedient.
Sometimes, in these fleeting moments when they are standing in the meadow, she almost forgets who he is – what he has become. Here, where he is just storm-gray and watching her with wine-red eyes, she remembers him most as the Forsaken Valley king; intimidating, and always possessing the strongest magic of anyone, but still the closest to mortal that she has ever known him to be. She can almost forget the dark god he has become; she can almost forget that the power that he wields is unparalleled. If she had needed a reason to let her guard down, his deceptively harmless appearance and mannerisms would have lured her in.
But for him, her guard is always down, even when the weight of what he is comes back to her.
Even though he has blinded her and drowned her, marked her and branded her, she somehow remains willing.
Maybe she does worship him, in her own peculiar way.
She follows his gaze upwards, where the sky was fading into night. “To the stars?” She doesn’t hide her confusion, and it reflects in the darkness of her eyes when she looks back at him. Her heart again flutters nervously against the delicate cage of her ribs, and she can feel her pulse rise to a hum in her throat. She was always completely at his mercy, but something about leaving here entirely created a new level of vulnerability for her.
And it makes her afraid, but still not in the normal sense.
“I’ll go,” she says, because she would never tell him no.
And, because she is already wondering if dying amongst the stars feels the same as every time she has died down here.
He is pleased that she’s caught on, and this strengthens the call of the worlds above, somehow. Magic sparks and zips along his blood, readying – it is no small feat, to ascend in such a fashion, to survive. The first time he’d done it he’d fallen back to the earth, spent and exhausted and with little power, for a moment, and it had been a strange feeling.
But he had been weaker then, closer to mortal than god, and it is not such an issue now – it only requires a bit of concentration, a flex of muscle, and all is well. Lord knows he’s wiled away enough time there, even sustained two star-bent children in one galaxy.
“Yes,” he says, “to the stars.”
She agrees – of course she does – and he is again pleased. He had no doubt that she would refuse, but she has surprised him before. This is no such surprise, but he’s still pleased, because he thinks she will take well to the stars, to the touch of constellations.
(He could let her shatter there, or burn her alive like an exploding star. Or sustain her. He is so rife with choices.)
“Good girl,” he says, and he touches her, threads her body with the magic she’ll need to survive while there. He likes the feel of his magic inside her, changing her, a queer intimacy he’s felt a thousand times before but still holds a certain kind of thrill.
“Hold on,” he says, though he’s an expression and nothing else, because he has already tethered her to him, and then they are going, evanescing, dissipating and reforming.
They reform in some far-flung galaxy, centuries away from Beqanna. The air around them aches in silence, and alien stars shine on unknowable planets.
(He does not explore the planets, often. He prefers to watch the chaos of the universe instead.)
He looks out, at this random universe, and then at her. She is a speck of white, here, a blank canvas.
“What do you think?” he asks, as they float there, amidst the stars.
He praises her, and she tries to suppress that feeling of twisted gratification that threatened to bloom inside of her again. She likes to think that she has come so far, that she is not that girl anymore; that she didn’t need validation from him, or anyone. It was a dangerous game that she let herself play, in knowing how easy it was to get caught up in needing to be what they wanted her to be. She knew what it meant to be fixated on someone so toxic, to want to break herself down so they could fashion her into what they craved. She knows better – of course she does, because by this point she is only rebuilt and remade parts, with fragments of what she used to be scattered in between.
But when she feels his magic suddenly igniting in her veins and spreading to every nerve-ending, she finds that she doesn’t care what poison he puts inside of her.
She isn’t sure if there are words to describe what it feels like to be starward bound. It’s different than being pulled through the earth and into the lair; faster, hotter, further. She blinks, and when she opens her eyes again to the sight of stars – endless amounts of them, far more than there could ever been seen from the ground – her breath hitches in her throat.
It’s impossibly quiet, and it almost, almost reminds her of being dead at the bottom of the sea. That vast expanse of nothing, when there is no afterlife; just an infinite silence and an existence that you can almost feel, if you could just wake up. But her heartbeat is echoing in her ears, and that is the only thing that reminds her that she is alive. She is alive, and so far away from any world she has lived in, and she doesn’t understand why that brings such an odd sense of peace to her. “It’s beautiful,” her voice, even though hushed, feels too loud out here, like the sound of it might cause the stars to fall. “I don’t know if I would ever go back to Beqanna, if I were you,” she says as she glances sideways at him, still trying to grasp that she is galaxies away from all she has ever known (with him, of everyone, but then, it could never have been anyone else).
It had almost humbled him, the first time he stumbled into the stars.
It had been a whim, a budding god testing limits, and when he had manifested the sight of such sprawling galaxies had nearly overwhelmed him. It was the kind of thing that would make a man weep, if he were indeed still a man, and not a god.
(Still – there had been a tightness in his throat. A feeling of smallness.)
The sight of it always unsettles him – but it uplifts him, too. Reminds him there are worlds yet unexplored. This is a necessary, as time becomes increasingly meaningless, as days pass like minutes.
He takes his eyes from the stars and watches her watching them, instead. He has not taken many here, it is more difficult, to sustain them for any prolonged period of time. But she is a curiosity still, and so he does not mind, bringing her amongst the stars.
Her voice breaks into the nothingness, made real by his magic. She expresses her admiration – of course she does – and he is pleased for it.
(Sound shouldn’t carry, of course – but neither should they be here, this strange, mad couple. In dark gods, all things are possible.)
“I didn’t, for a long time,” he says. He isn’t sure how long he stayed up here, at first. He’d stayed until he couldn’t any more, and even then, he’d returned as soon as his magic had refreshed itself.
“I enjoy bringing it back with me, though,” he says, and as he does, the galaxies leak onto his skin, starting at the ankles, crawling up the legs, “not all are as fortunate as you. They don’t get to see it for themselves, so I take what I can.”
A pause, then.
“It’s quite a feeling, taking the stars under your skin. You should try.”
He touches her, and lets the stars in.
Maybe later, when she was earthbound again, when there was ground solid beneath her and the stars were once again suspended above her, it would strike her how strange everything was. She never understood the fascination that seemed to surround her, when she was so plain, and she had never accomplished anything. She just existed, and things happened to her; maybe because she looked for them, maybe because she just let them. She remembers when Heartfire had asked her if she enjoyed her life, and she had been perplexed by such a question, but here, surrounded by stardust and strange moons and a dark god, she thinks she can almost understand what drove her to ask it.
She has never seen him as anything but gray, but she has seen his star-studded children. She has seen the nebula markings and the dappled constellations, she has seen the moonbeam colorings and the way they can manipulate the stars, and she had known they were his, because there was no other explanation. But when she tears her gaze away from the galaxies and stars in front of her, to look at him as it bleeds into his skin, until it drowns the gray with the nebulas and swirling stardust and all the colors that surround them, she is again reminded of who he is. There is an overpowering desire to reach out and touch him, to see if he burns like stars, but with a rapidly beating heart, she suddenly feels frozen.
But then he touches her. The spark it elicits is nothing new, she is used to the way his touch feels like electricity in her veins. But she doesn’t expect the way it rides into something else; doesn’t expect the feeling of stars crawling under her skin and spilling over the porcelain white of her like an entire galaxy saturating a blank canvas. It hitches a breath in her throat, until she is breathless and dizzy, but sparkling in a way she never has before.
“Carnage,” she whispers his name like a prayer, with reverence and trepidation reflecting in the sable of her eyes, “why did you bring me here?” She touches him, emboldened by the way they both glitter like stars and space, her lips brushing his neck and shoulder. He could break her apart, here; he could shatter her into stardust, and she wouldn’t even mind. There is a part of her — a part of her that forgets about Skellig, about Dhumin, and even Ashhal — that wants nothing more than to be his, and she would let herself be torn apart over and over for eternity if that’s what it took.
Ryatah
even angels have their wicked schemes
I wrote most of this while sitting at a barrel race, so, I hope it makes sense lmao
